“To the Eucharist, green; to Baptism, white; to Confirmation, yellow; to Penance, red; to Ordination, purple; to Marriage blue; to Extreme Unction, a violet so deep as to be almost black.

“Well, you will admit that the interpretation of this sacred scheme of colour is not altogether easy.

“The pictorial imagery of Baptism, Extreme Unction, and Ordination is quite clear; Marriage even as symbolized by blue may be intelligible to simple souls; that Communion should blazon its coat with vert, is even more appropriate, since green represents sap and humility, and is emblematical of the regenerative power.  But ought not Confession to display violet rather than red; and how, in any case, are we to account for Confirmation being figured in yellow?”

“The colour of the Holy Ghost is certainly red,” remarked the Abbe Plomb.

“Thus there are differences of interpretation between Angelico and Roger van der Weyden, though they lived at the same time.  Still, the monk seems to me the more trustworthy authority.”

“For my part,” said the Abbe Gevresin, “I cannot but think of the right side of the lining of which you were speaking just now.”

“This rule of contraries is not peculiar to the ritual of colour; it is to be seen in almost every part of the science of symbolism.  Look at the emblems derived from the animal world; the eagle alternately figuring Christ and the Devil; the snake which, while it is one of the most familiar symbols of the Demon, may nevertheless, as in the brazen serpent of Moses, prefigure the Saviour.”

“The anticipatory symbol of Christian symbolism was the double-faced Janus of the heathen world,” said the Abbe Plomb, laughing.

“Indeed, these allegories of the palette turn completely to the right-about,” said Durtal.  “Take red, for instance:  we have seen that in the general acceptation it is to be interpreted as meaning charity, endurance, and love.  This is the right side out; the wrong side, according to Sister Emmerich, is dulness, and clinging to this world’s goods.

“Grey, the emblem of repentance and sorrow, and at the same time the image of a lukewarm soul, is also, according to another interpretation, symbolical of the Resurrection—­white, piercing through blackness—­light entering into the Tomb and coming out as a new hue—­grey, a mixed colour still heavy with the gloom of death, but reviving as it gets light by degrees from the whiteness of day.

“Green, to which the mystics gave favourable meanings, also acquires a disastrous sense in some cases; it then represents moral degradation and despair; it borrows melancholy significance from dead leaves, is the colour given to the bodies of the devils in Stephan Lochner’s Last Judgment, and in the infernal scenes depicted in the glass windows and pictures of the earliest artists.

“Black and brown, with their inimical suggestions of death and hell, change their meaning as soon as the founders of religious Orders adopt them for the garb of the cloister.  Black then symbolizes renunciation, repentance, the mortification of the flesh, according to Durand de Mende; and brown and even grey suggest poverty and humility.